


definitions of freedom

by ninemoons42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Koukyoushihen Eureka Seven | Eureka seveN (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mecha Pilots, Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - Pilots, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Falling out of the sky, First Kiss, Genetically Engineered Beings, Human Experimentation, M/M, Mecha, Medical Torture, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Unethical Experimentation, bad scientists, skinny!Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-20 01:51:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2410598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Barnes is systematically transformed into something else, something other, and groomed to become an instrument of destruction. One of his handlers, Steve Rogers, teaches him how to fly and teaches him how to fight, and eventually breaks out of the mold of the good soldier by caring for him.</p><p>And then they are separated, causing James to rediscover his human emotions, and separately and together they make a break for their freedom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	definitions of freedom

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a loose retelling of the story in [THIS video](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/post/98476772366/guys-that-au-idea-i-was-blathering-about). The video comes from the climactic arc of the anime series _Eureka Seven_ ; basically, Bucky and Steve are Anemone and Dominic, and Natasha and Sam are Eureka and Renton. I couldn't find a way to work Gulliver (Anemone's oversized pet) in, so I had to leave him out, unfortunately. However, this AU DOES mean I get to save the LFO called theEND, so that works out nicely.
> 
> (I'm serious about the warnings for non-consensual medical torture and experimentation; in _Eureka Seven_ Anemone goes through hell and back with everything that's been done to her, and I've actually omitted the possible overtones of grooming and sexual abuse from this fic.)

He remembers this part with about as much clarity as he can summon up these days, the clarity of his own blood splashed on his skin and the clarity of nerves screaming pain and fear and the constant, constant cold:

Metal slab beneath him that will never warm to the contours of his shoulders and the backs of his legs. Restraints wrapped around his wrists and ankles. Maybe the metal slab has shrunk beneath him; he doesn’t remember being stretched out as much as this before. But he does remember the tray of needles and knives and all kinds of steel, gleaming, heartless, and always cold, always pushing ice into his skin as he’s cut open and stabbed and poked and probed. 

They never give him anything to dull his overloaded senses; if anything, some of the things they administer _must_ be stimulants, or else he wouldn’t feel that ice that burns inside him, that drips onto his tongue and that crawls around behind his eyeballs.

He screams until he has no voice left and no more insults to hurl, and then he screams some more in perfect hoarse silence, and then – finally, he breaks, or they let him break, and he can disappear into the darkness.

*

He remembers, too, the pot of strawberry preserves.

He’d never tasted strawberries until he came to this place that stank of fear and antiseptics and innumerable tears – and he’d shied away from them, the first time: they’d looked so unnaturally red, a shocking color against the white walls and the white sheets and the blank white lights that burned at all hours. 

He’d feared the strawberries until he was _ordered_ to eat one, and then – this he can also remember, the wash of unexpected astringent sweetness on his tongue. The bits and pieces of red pulp laced with tiny seeds. Red red juice on his fingertips, and choking everything down, desperate eating, because it tasted so good and nothing so good was ever allowed into the white rooms that had slowly been taken over by silence as the other screaming voices fell silent.

“Because you were brave, and because you did not scream,” the little doctor had said, and the strawberry had turned to ashes in his mouth as he remembered the nights full of pain without words, feeling like his insides were twisting up and trying to crawl up his throat, feeling like there were thousands of knives scraping away at him beneath his skin, carving him out and leaving him slumped and helpless.

He’s more or less gotten used to those nights and he’s more or less gotten used to the pot of strawberry preserves, cloying and tasting nothing at all like the original fruit. Still. The preserves are his and he needs to eat. So he eats the red with his fingers and doesn’t care about leaving crimson stains everywhere he goes, red bleeding into antiseptic white.

*

Once, he falls into the darkness while he’s on the metal slab, and he swims back up into being awake _still_ on the slab, and there are hands holding a mirror up to his face. “Look,” a voice orders. “Look.”

That must be his face, and that must be his hair – greasy and lank and falling untidily around his shoulders, where is the little pin he was given, has he lost it again – and then he sees. His own eyes. He doesn’t recognize the eyes staring back at him from the reflection. Gray eyes. He remembers, hazily, blue, once upon a time – the dark blue of a summer midnight streaked with shooting stars. He thinks that someone must have poked holes in his eyes and now all of the color has leaked out, and he says so out loud, and someone makes a sound that he can’t recognize before there’s another brief sting and he’s gone again.

But after he wakes up to the pot of strawberry preserves there’s someone else in his quarters: more white and an impression of washed-out yellow. A person. Someone he’s never seen before, who is asking him questions: “Do you have a name?”

He has no idea how to answer. Does he still have a name? He remembers numbers, a designation of some kind, but that had only been useful when he hadn’t been alone in these rooms, and now that he is alone the doctors and the scientists and the technicians call him “You” when he’s wanted for more testing and prodding.

He opens the pot and scoops up strawberry pulp and drips it everywhere, and he sticks his fingers into his mouth and sucks, and then: “My name. I think they called me James, once.”

More questions. “James? That was your name?”

“I just _said_ ,” James says.

A quick breath. “All right. I see. I’m Steve. Steve Rogers. They told me I’d be working with you. Teaching you.”

James sucks his thumb clean of too-sweet red. “Teach me what else? I already know how to kill people, you know,” and he lunges at the person named Steve Rogers, gets those sticky fingers around that throat, and Steve Rogers is small and thin and scrawny and it would be easy, so easy, to angle his thumbs correctly, to bear down and _squeeze_ – 

Steve is still talking. He does not sound afraid. “I was going to be an LFO pilot until they told me I was too small. Doesn’t stop me from knowing everything there is to know about flying them. And you’ll need me, and what I know.”

The letters are important. But there’s also this, this red-edged fun like danger and corpses. James smirks. Drawls. “Why.”

“Because they’ve built you a one-of-a-kind LFO and I know how to fly it.”

The letters _are_ important: they stand for Light Flying Operation and they’re one of the things James is being _remade_ for. 

He’s still pressing down on Steve’s airways, and Steve is starting to turn interesting colors. Steve doesn’t look away, though. “The LFO – _your_ LFO – is called theEND and it’s waiting for you.”

theEND. What a perfectly terrifying name for an LFO.

James likes it.

But he continues to hold Steve down for a few more minutes, before he reluctantly disengages. “Take me to my LFO. Take me to theEND.”

Steve coughs, chokes, and James watches him with dry sugar-stained interest, until Steve can manage to rise to his feet, can rasp out a response: “This way.”

*

theEND’S eyes are always watching him, and James stares back at those myriad eyes as best as he can. He’s not afraid. He’s not. The sky wheels around him as he yanks at the connections between him and the LFO. The suit that he wears couples him directly into the LFO, his body and its body, his mind and its mind. 

They’d put him on a one-hour IV drip before hooking him up into the LFO. Sickly green liquid dripping into him. He can see so clearly. He’s never been so angry.

“Communications test,” says an almost familiar voice. A screen shaped like an eye pops up in the all-around displays. Who is this person who is talking to him. James scrambles for the name. It doesn’t come easily. 

“Steve,” James hears himself say.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Do I get to shoot you out of the sky, Steve? Can I do that?”

“Not today, James.”

James bares his teeth and spits several insults at him. “Slow. Idiot. Weak.”

“Save it,” Steve clips out. “You have incoming.”

Oh. So he does. The sky comes alight with bright explosions. James slashes and strikes with messy ferocity. LFOs, he has learned, bleed like humans do, though they bleed dark blue. He would have preferred them to bleed red, like strawberry juice.

He soars over the facility in which he lives and does not notice that the heads-up displays attach a name to the location: 

_Joy Division_.

*

Steve is not always there.

He says that he has work to do.

James just sneers. Throws a clot of strawberry-red at him, when he does show. “Too busy for me. Too important. Just like all the doctors. You only see me if you want me for something. What do you want from me, Steve? The doctors want my screams. They want bits and pieces of me, they test me, like I’m just some pathetic lab rat. You want my blood too?”

Bland face. Bland eyes. Steve does not seem to _fear_ him at all, and that is what makes James push at him. James wants to tear into Steve’s eyes, Steve’s mouth, and see who he is on the inside. Claw him down to the bones and sinews. 

“No, James,” is all Steve says. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“What does that even mean,” James asks, eventually, curiosity winning out. “Isn’t hurting what humans do to each other? Day in and day out they fight and they disagree and they all want to say they’re right and none of them are.” He forms his hand into the shape of a beak, closes and opens his hand a few times. “Squawk squawk squawk. Meaningless.”

“They are,” Steve agrees, though he looks like he’s eaten something sour when he says the words. After a pause, he adds, “You’re not.”

James shakes his head, curls around his pot of strawberry preserves, doesn’t offer Steve any.

*

When Steve is not there, the hours blur by. Perhaps there’s a little respite in the sickly-green IV that is administered right before James puts on his special suit and disappears into theEND. 

Eventually, even the strawberry preserves lose all taste and meaning, and he flings handfuls of pulp at the walls and reluctantly eats the dregs.

He finds himself trying to remember conversations with Steve.

_“Tell me about Coralians, Steve.”_

_“They are supposed to be the alien species behind the manifestation of the Scub Coral. Scub Coral now covers or has been found over large sections of Earth. It is said that it is the interactions between the Earth and the Scub Coral that creates trapar. Without trapar, people and machines wouldn’t be able to go lifting.”_

_“Lifting. Flying.”_

_“Something like that. You know what that is, since you fly theEND, and you are very good at it.”_

_“I am very good at flying. But they had to do things to me first. Change me. Make me into something strange.” Unnatural eyes are just the beginning. “They wanted a Coralian of their own. They produced me. The defective copy. What is the name of the Coralian girl, the real one? The one who defected?”_

_Concerned look. “She was called Eureka, once. Now she goes by the name Natalia, or Natasha. The sources are not clear.”_

_“She chose her own name.”_

_“James.”_

_“I want to be able to do that, Steve.”_

In the silence of his white quarters, with layers upon layers of real and imaginary pain clinging to his nerves with endless claws, James broods, and wonders where Steve has gone.

*

Another day, another pot of strawberry preserves. 

There is a message, however, in this pot: a piece of sturdy material buried at the very bottom. James unfolds the note with red-stained hands. 

_I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long. I was on a mission and I got lost._

James snorts. For all that Steve is a very good LFO pilot, he’s hopeless on the ground. It is as if he only works properly if he’s in flight; on his own two feet, he’s likely to get turned around and baffled by directions. 

_And someone helped me find my way: his name is Sam. Natasha’s companion. She chose him, and he chose her, and I think I have learned something new from him. And I would like you to have the chance to learn what I did. So I am looking for a way to get you out of Joy Division. Out, free, with me, and with theEND if I can...._

James stops reading.

He knows what to do, instinctively: he commits the message to memory. He casts about for something to destroy the message with. Steve is talking about words like _freedom_ and _choice_ , and these are words that sound like _treason_ , words that sound like _death_. 

Death, that is, for Steve. There will be no such easy escape for James or for theEND. He is a weapon, as is the LFO, and they are too valuable. Steve’s words, if found, will mean doors locked and barred. Will mean being buried.

James can feel something pricking at the corners of his eyes as he strikes a match – he drinks in the scent of ignition and sulfur – and burns Steve’s words out of existence.

Something pricking at his heart. He didn’t know that he still had one. 

And for the first time in a very long while, James remembers what it’s like to cry.

*

The green liquid that drips into his veins makes him feel strong as it always does, but it isn’t anger that makes him eager to get into his LFO. Not this time. He used to like being angry. Now, though, he knows he would rather feel this sadness.

Sadness means he can mark the fact of Steve passing out of his life.

Steve has not come back from his mission. James has heard the whispers in the corners of the facility. Steve is on the run and Steve is being hunted. He will not come back to James’s room to talk to him, to read to him, to sit with him.

He had never even had the chance to reach out for Steve’s hand.

He worries, now, and worry is like steel bands clamped around his insides. Tight. Tighter. He hopes Steve finds his safe place.

theEND looms out of the shadows at him, black, with red eyes, and James aches to be placed into it. He doesn’t want to fight Natasha and Sam. 

The world has gone mad since Steve left. Scub Coral appearing in places where it had never been reported before. People being attacked by strange things coming out of the Scub Coral. Steve would have helped him make sense of it all, but Steve is gone, and James is on his own.

A different set of orders, this time. He and theEND must go _into_ the Scub Coral. They must find what is called the Command Cluster, and attack it. Destroy it. What will happen after? He is not told. 

He follows his orders. Bound into theEND, he flies and flies and flies, and his thoughts chase themselves in circles. He wants to see Steve again. Wants to talk to him again. He’s said a lot of terrible things to Steve. He wishes he could take all the insults back. 

_I want to be free to choose. And I would choose to be with him. I’d follow him to the ends of the earth and keep him from getting lost. Or I would get lost with him._

Another LFO in the distance. James knows who is in it, but he is not expecting – he is not expecting children. _Natasha has children?_ But the life signs confirm it: three boys, clustered in the cockpit of the LFO, together with its two pilots.

He makes theEND fire on Natasha and Sam, half-heartedly. 

_I want to be with Steve._

“Don’t do this!” A boy’s voice. Is that Sam? “You can’t fire on the Command Cluster!”

James switches on his comms. “Those are my orders,” he says.

“Don’t, James,” says a girl’s voice. Natasha. “If you fire on the Command Cluster, the Scub Coral will take you, or it will take me. I don’t want to be taken. I want to stay with my family.”

James musters up a smile. He wants to cry. “Then stay with your family. Let them protect you. I will go into the Scub Coral.”

“I have been in there, James. I was almost eaten. I was almost turned into a monster. Something worse than what I used to be.”

“That sounds good,” he tells Natasha. “Better that than this.”

“Why are you so sad?” Sam asks, quietly.

“Because I’ve lost someone. Someone who was important to me. I never got the chance to tell him.”

Again James fires on Natasha and Sam, and again the shot goes wide, and this time they approach him and theEND. The sound of latches. 

James stares. They rise out of their cockpit. Sam and Natasha’s joined hands. Three boys holding on to them. 

And Natasha is smiling. “You can tell him, James. You can find him and you can tell him.”

“I don’t know where he is! He could be anywhere! He could have been attacked by the Scub Coral! I’ve lost him! Because I’m worthless and a, a freak! The others died and I lived and they turned me into something terrible!”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Sam says. “They did things to you. They forced you to do things.”

“They did, and I stopped fighting them,” James says. “That makes me a monster.”

“They’re the monsters, not you!” Natasha says. 

“And they made me.” James closes his eyes. “Please fly away. Save yourselves. I will do as I’ve been told – I will carry out my orders – ” 

“No,” Sam says.

And at the same time, another voice, a frantic cry:

“JAMES!”

Who? He knows that voice, though it sounds so strange, so unfamiliar – 

“ _James!_ ”

And the name rises from him, tears itself free: “ _Steve._ ”

Where, where, where? James dodges around Sam and Natasha’s LFO, eyes scanning the clouds, and then theEND shows him a zoomed-in image: Steve, _it’s Steve_ , and he’s falling through the endless gray – 

James screams, blasts towards his position, his name on his lips, a yearning cry: “Steve!”

And: eyes on him. theEND’s eyes, all looking at him, all focused on him. The cockpit opens up without his conscious command. He meets his LFO’s steady gaze, and suddenly knows what it is going to do, and he lets it happen.

theEND rolls forward and as it begins to come back upright James’s restraints fall away, and James is falling, too, diving towards Steve. 

“Steve, Steve,” he calls, and Steve opens his eyes, reaches for him – 

Steve is still skinny, still short, but now James is learning that he is strong – because he holds on with such ferocity that James wants to weep and wants to never let him go.

“You’re alive, you’re alive,” James whispers, and the wind of their fall freezes the tears on his cheeks. “I was so worried – ”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. “I was looking for a way to come and get you.”

“Where have you been?” They are having this conversation in free-fall. James has known stranger things. 

“I – I joined Sam and Natasha. I’m part of their organization now.”

Of course he did. James asks, “Do you think they’ll have me, too? Even though – I am what I am?”

Steve smiles. He looks so sweet and gentle and strong. “You _are_ a good person, James, you’re an amazing person, and they’d be happy to have you – _I’d_ be happy to be with you again – ”

James shakes him, and Steve shuts up, and James says, “I can’t hear you.”

Steve blinks, and smiles again, and there is red in his cheeks when he clears his throat and then shouts, practically in James’s face, “I would be happy to be with you again!”

“Me too.” James nods, tries to smile, and he surges forward and kisses Steve.

James keeps his eyes open as Steve kisses him back, and that is how he knows that there are great black hands moving towards them, carefully plucking them out of the sky.

Steve’s hands are on his cheeks, brushing away his tears. 

Steve’s eyes are wet, too, and wonderingly James touches him, pulls him into another soft kiss. “I want to be with you, Steve, always.”

“Then we’ll be together,” Steve says. “You and me and theEND.”

But James doesn’t fly theEND after Sam and Natasha – the LFO flies them, seemingly of its own accord, out and away from the Command Cluster.

“We’re still going to have to deal with that,” Steve says, looking over his shoulder, lines at the corners of his eyes. 

“Yes,” James says. “You and me and – them,” and he points to the other LFO with its still-open cockpit: at Natasha who is smiling at her three sons and at Sam who is smiling at her.

“I have so many things to tell you,” Steve says.

“I have a few things to say, too,” James says. “I hope I can find the right words.”

“I’ll find you some strawberries. Real ones. Those preserves were – not so good.”

“No, they weren’t,” James agrees. And: “Please don’t stop looking at me.”

Steve smiles. “I never did.” A pause, and then, heavy hands around his. “Be with me, James. Choose me, and theEND, and not – not Joy Division. Don’t go back. But it has to be your choice.”

“I’ll be with you, Steve,” James says, “you and theEND,” and freedom must be Steve’s smile and Steve’s arms around him, and his arms around Steve.

**Author's Note:**

> I am also on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/).


End file.
